Attention, a necessary condition- Spirituality

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2017-06-01 L’Osservatore Romano

It was
1940. France was partially occupied by the Nazis and the French Jewish
intellectual Simone Weil, one of the most original voices of the 20th century,
after much hesitation left Paris with her parents. She moved first to Vichy and
then to Toulouse and finally, in September, to Marseille where she hoped it
would be easier to board a boat in order to reach Free France, the resistance
movement organized by Charles de Gaulle from England. Her plan soon proved to
be very difficult to carry out and, obliged to stay longer in this
Mediterranean city, she established new cultural relations and friendships, she
formed new ties with old acquaintances and sought work as a farm labourer. This
enforced stay in Marseille prevented her from immediately implementing her
political project but was not unfruitful. The young philosopher was to live one
of the most spiritually fruitful periods of her life in Marseille between 1940
and 1941.

Indeed it
was in this period that, as well as drafting her Cahiers de Marseille [Marseille
Notebooks] and her writings on the Greek tradition which were to come
together in Intuitions pré-chrétiennes [Pre-Christian Intuitions], she wrote
several essays on the love of God which are true jewels of Christian
meditation. Two of these reflect precisely on the significance of prayer: Á propos du Pater [Concerning the Our Father], and Reflexions
sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu [Reflections on the Right Use of School
Studies with a View to the Love of God].

Before her
arrival in Marseille Simone Weil had never prayed. Of course in 1937 she had
already had her Assisi experience in which for the first time in her life
something stronger than herself had forced her to kneel while she was in Santa
Maria degli Angeli in the Chapel of the Porziuncola, and later, during Easter
1938, she had had in Solesmes the unexpected encounter with Christ, person to
person, while she was reciting George Herbert’s poem, Love. However, never before – as she confided to Joseph-Marie
Perrin, the young Dominican father she had met in Marseille with whom in this
period she kept up a copious correspondence – had it happened that she had
prayed, in the literal sense of the word. She had never addressed words to God,
she had never recited a liturgical prayer. So what had occurred? What had urged
her to pray?

While she
was working on the farm of Gustave Thibon, the peasant-philosopher who, at Perrin’s suggestion, she had asked to
teach her a little Greek, Simone thought of using the text of the Our Father. And it was then that the
infinite sweetness of that Greek text won her heart, to the point that for
several days she could not do without reciting it to herself continuously and,
when later she began to harvest the grapes, every day before starting work she
would recite the Our Father in Greek
and repeated it frequently in the vineyard. From that moment she resolved to
recite it every morning with absolute attention. “If while I say it”, she
confided to the Dominican father who had become a friend, “my attention strays
or is blunted, even only in an infinitesimal way, I begin again from the
beginning until I have for once achieved absolutely pure attention”.

It is easy
to see from this quotation how important the concept of “attention” is in order
to grasp Weil’s conception of prayer. Indeed, for the French Jewish woman
praying meant nothing other than orienting to God all the attention of which
the soul is capable, as we read in the lovely essay she wrote for the Catholic
students of Montpellier, Reflections on
the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. In this
sense, attention applied to school texts is a preparation and an education for
that more elevated and intense attention required by prayer.

But for
Weil if prayer consisted of attention, if this was its substance, then praying
mechanically without paying attention to the words pronounced mentally or aloud
means not praying, or at least not really praying. What, therefore, is
attention and how is it developed? How do we become attentive? How do we teach ourselves attention and
concentration?

Attention,
for Simone Weil, was neither an act of will nor a muscular effort. In her
experience as a teacher she had realized that when she asked her students to
pay attention she saw them wrinkle their brows, hold their breath and contract
their muscles, but if a few minutes later she asked them what they had paid
attention to they were unable to reply. In fact, they had not paid attention,
they had simply contracted their muscles.

Yet in
Weil’s opinion attention was neither an innate quality nor something that
happens without our consent: it presupposes a task, it entails an effort,
perhaps greater than any other, but this is a negative effort. In order to look
at a beautiful painting or to listen to a passage of music and especially to
pray to God with attention it is necessary to free one’s mind from personal
preoccupations, thoughts and desires and to create an emptiness within oneself.
Attention is expectation and like expectation it presupposes that every other
occupation and purpose has been set aside and that we are entirely focused on
what is happening. Paying attention thus requires the hard work and effort
involved in effacing the will and the ego in order to make them open to
accepting and letting themselves be filled by something else.

Like
expectation, attention is thus a non-active action, a passive activity. It is
the act by which the ego detaches itself from itself and returns to itself:
“Attention”, we read in the essay just cited, “is detaching oneself from
oneself and returning to oneself, just as one breathes in and breathes out”.

However if
in order to know the truth it is necessary to pay attention, to be attentive it
is necessary to desire the truth. Only a correctly orientated desire makes us
capable of attention in studies, only an authentic love for truth and for God
renders us capable of accepting them in reflection and in prayer. Simone Weil,
a pupil of the Kantian philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (known as Alain), was
convinced that a well-oriented desire was one that desires truth only for
truth’s sake and good only for goodness’ sake. Any other motivation that
intervenes in the attention with which we make ourselves available to truth and
to God degrades, contaminates and undermines it.

A student
who applies him- or herself to studying with commitment in order to obtain good
marks in examinations may even succeed in obtaining them but will never know
the pure truth. His or her desire is not sufficiently whole because it is not
guided by disinterested thought or by that “intellectual probity” which alone,
in purifying him or her, would have led the student to the truth. In the same
way, we must not pray to God, our Father who is in heaven, in order to ask him
for something, however noble and lofty it may be, whose purpose is that of our
own will. As the prayer which Jesus taught us says, commented upon line by line
by the philosopher in Concerning the Our
Father, it is necessary to pray to God so that his will may be done,
whatever it may be.

Thus for
Simone Weil prayer involved a preventive inner disposition, a preparation for
contact with God. The disinterested approach, which Simone Weil preferred to
describe as “impersonal”, is what disposes us to attention and opens our
consciousness to truth. Better put, it is what prepares us to receive it.

There is in
Weil always a deeply-rooted reservation about the ego and all that concerns the
personal sphere, which she maintains is always invalidated by self-centredness.
Praying, in short, thus means for her tearing our own desire and thought from
the cage of the ego to orientate it to God. And the outcome of prayer conceived
in this way is to assimilate ourselves to God, to make ourselves perfect as is
our Father who is in heaven and to love the world as he loves it, impartially.
The Gospel verse which Weil repeatedly comments on in her work and seems always
to have in mind in her religious reflection is that which says: “Be sons of
your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the
good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt 5:45).

However, if
in prayer we become his children, similar to him in love, in the imitation of
the indiscriminate distribution of rain and sunlight, this filiation and
assimilation are nevertheless not a human achievement. For Simone Weil it is
God who raises us and makes us his children. If, therefore, desire orientated
to God is the only force capable of uplifting the soul, the action of God who
comes to hold on to the soul and to raise it is a response to this desire. “He
comes”, the writer notes, “only to those who invite him to come; to those who
ask him often, for a long time and ardently”. And she insists: “God cannot
exempt himself from coming down to them”.

Thus for
Simone Weil God is not only the impersonal fate of the stoics, he is not
necessity, even though this is one of his aspects, but is a God who loves, who
listens to the sincere prayers of human beings, who waits at the door of their
souls, ready to enter as soon as they invite him to.

He is the
God love of the Gospel, of the mystics, who makes himself present to those who
love him and invoke him in prayer, pure and disinterested, as happened to
Simone during her recitation of the Our
Father. “Sometimes”, she told Perrin, “already the first words tear my
thoughts from my body to carry them to a place outside space, where there is
neither perspective nor point of view. The space opens up. The infinity of the
ordinary space of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or
sometimes the third power. At the same time this infinity is entirely filled
with silence, which is not the absence of sound but rather the object of a
positive sensation, more positive than that of a sound. Noises, if there are
any, reach me only after passing through this silence. And at times, during
these recitations or at other moments, Christ is present in person, but with a
presence infinitely more real, more touching, clearer and fuller of love than
when he took hold of me for the first time”.